THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE NEWS MEDIA; Pollsters Faulted for Failure to Predict Edwards's Surge and for Subsequent News Coverage

Senator John Kerry may have beaten Senator John Edwards by nearly six percentage points in Wisconsin on Tuesday, but it was Mr. Edwards who picked up a tsunami of momentum in newspapers and on television, with pundits lauding him for beating their expectations.

Yesterday the source for those expectations, polls before the primary, were criticized for missing a late surge in popularity for Mr. Edwards, prompting a contentious debate within the news media over whether news outlets have been over-reliant on such polls. Some questioned whether Mr. Edwards received a bigger public relations bounce from his showing than he should have.

The debate broke into the open in the early morning, when a longtime polling executive, Warren Mitofsky, posted the following note on an Internet site for pollsters: ''Yesterday exposed the biggest polling goofs in my memory.'' It gained particular notice because Mr. Mitofsky is one of the men in charge of the main service used by the networks and The Associated Press to survey voters when they leave the polls.

He went on to criticize the two main polls before the voting that helped lead many news outlets to expect that Mr. Kerry would beat Mr. Edwards by a much bigger margin than he did.

One last week by the American Research Group showed Mr. Kerry with 53 percent of the vote to Mr. Edwards's 16 percent. Another, from Zogby International, showed Mr. Kerry with 47 percent of the vote to Mr. Edwards's 20 percent, and Howard Dean's 23 percent, as of Feb. 15.

Mr. Kerry, in the end, won with 40 percent of the vote to Mr. Edwards's 34 percent. Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, finished third with 18 percent of the vote, leading anchors like Wolf Blitzer on CNN to excitedly tell his viewers on Tuesday, ''a much closer race than many of us had expected.''

Calling the earlier polls flawed, Mr. Mitofsky said in an interview yesterday that if they had accurately picked up support for Mr. Edwards, the coverage would have played out differently -- perhaps giving him less of a bounce. That bounce helped Mr. Edwards dismiss questions about his viability and also helped him to raise $310,000 on the Internet by the late afternoon.

''Nobody would have been surprised that it was close, there would have been the expectation of maybe even an Edwards victory,'' Mr. Mitofsky said. Instead, he added, the polling ''made him look like a hero.''

Conversely, Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster, said the coverage, based on the polls, set Mr. Kerry up for a fall.

''Virtually every news outlet, based on public opinion polling, created the expectation and standard that John Kerry would have a big victory,'' he said. ''So anything that was short of a big victory almost inherently becomes a disappointment.''

John Zogby, the president of Zogby International, said his polling ended Sunday night, before a Democratic debate. The good reviews Mr. Edwards won that night, Mr. Zogby said, helped him with voters, as did the late endorsement from The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Dismissing Mr. Mitofsky's critique as the rantings of ''a grumpy old man'' -- Mr. Mitofsky is 69 -- Mr. Zogby said: ''There is conventional wisdom and there are pollsters, and pollsters oftentimes help to define the conventional wisdom. As of Sunday at about 5 p.m., when the last poll finished, the conventional wisdom was 'Kerry's ahead.' ''

Defending his company's poll, Dick Bennett, president of the American Research Group, said Mr. Kerry's support plummeted extraordinarily after his polling concluded.

Still, Gary Langer, the director of polling at ABC News, said he was not sure Mr. Edwards's support could have surged that much that quickly.

''The critical thing is, we as news organizations need to establish standards for survey research that we will not report,'' Mr. Langer said, adding that ABC had such standards.